foxpro.catalyst «

FoxPro workBLOGS and MORE… . . .

Before today… make that yesterday, since it is already 2AM and I have just decided to call it a day in terms of database-related works, it was a consecutive three day client visits for me. It is quite a busy start for this week. And it will be busier in the days to come since I’m targeting to complete most of these projects by the end of May.

Haven’t done much surfing lately too so I can’t give you interesting links for now. What I do these days is copy the links that my RSSReader grabs for me and save this batch on an Excel file which I will later copy and paste inside HTTrack for some midnight-to-morning ‘pulling’. So far I haven’t read those articles yet.

I’m also planning to take some time to do some updates at pixelcatalyst.lair which I have been neglecting these days. PixelWorkz, the site from where pixelcatalyst.lair was derived will turn five years this 19th of May so probably I’d be uploading some stuff which I haven’t had the time to upload for months already. These would include the artworks I submitted to DepthCore during last month’s Submergence release and something related to the on going collaboration between me and ShadowElement. Add a batch of tutorials and some stock photos.

OK… this feed just came in: West Wind Html Help Builder 3.25 released.

From the Editor: The Birth of a New Generation by David Stevenson. .NET Rocks! interviews DonXML.

Beware of sasser. Rumors claim that it can cause baldness and irritation of the skin. More info and helpful links here.

Random quickie-mind blobs.

• If you can’t afford to buy your dream house, create them in photoshop. Better… make them look edible.
• PixelPalooza winners from Icon Factory. I have this ‘thing’ for desktop icons. I strongly believed they are ewoks or some other cuddly character from Star Wars before they were reborn in this era.
• Who needs Albert Einstein and education when you can measure the speed of light using marshmallows..? Oh you can even eat the marshmallows after the experiment.
• With Google Inc.’s S1 filing comes a lot of things. I won’t even include a hyperlink this time. The news is everywhere in the ‘net for the past few days. From news to analysis to estimates on how many machines Google is running to their quirks that makes you love Google even more.

Geek humor: If you take a close look at the form Google filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the exact value of its planned offering is $2,718,281,828 dollars, which some would immediately recognize as the mathematical constant e.

E, for those not blessed with a Ph.D. and a job at Google, is Euler’s number, which is used as the base for natural logarithms.

• Fibonacci is everywhere. It’s even in the pattern of Elmo’s underwear.
• The latest from mind control technology, eh? MY relationship with my pet pterodactyl uses a technology two steps ahead of this one. But I don’t have any plans of sharing it for now. Besides I’m not sure if it is error-proof already. I haven’t seen my pterodactyl for three months already. If you see one with a barcode in it’s neck that reads ‘0987253251129‘ please be kind enough to inform me. Just be careful not to touch the mouth part… the pterodactyl’s saliva is equivalent to superglue.
• May 2004 issue of MSDN is out. It even has a downloadable .chm version.
• Ever wondered why Microsoft settled with Sun? Well that at least is according to Tom Yager.

Hmmm… seriously, anyone have any ideas how to track that pterodactyl of mine?

To download our Foxpro file of the day, proceed to Universal Thread.VFPZone‘s download section and search for ‘PDM’. If you’re lucky you’ll find the Project Documenting Machine. You’ll also see the comments that often state how impressive that downloadable project is that documents almost every aspect of your VisualFoxpro project and outputs it in multiple HTML format. To top it’s rich features, it includes the VisualFoxpro source codes and some nifty plug-ins.

What else can you ask for..?

Also… I saw a new batch of sample chapters at Hentzenwerke’s Developers Studio Apartment. These topics ranges from Visual Foxpro, OpenOffice.org, Linux, internet-related matters and software development.

I’ve been following the updates and articles inside West Wind Technologies for months now, but it was only recently that I have discovered that Rick Strahl, the main brain behind that site, maintains a blog. West Wind is a good resource if you’re into developing Visual Foxpro applications for the web. Rick Strahl discusses programming issues on his blog and there are helpful whitepapers, articles and downloadable stuff in that site as well.

One of his recent blog discusses Open source and making money.

Speaking of ‘insightful blogs’ here’s Lenn Pryor’s take on Evangelism, dogma, rhetoric, and believing and Joel Spolsky’s views on Perfectionism.

Note to self: Refrain from lambasting VB when evangelizing VisualFoxpro.

While the next article link is not a blog, it is a good read too. Besides anything Google-related is interesting. Google and Akamai: Cult of Secrecy versus Kingdom of Openness

Code Tuning Techniques: How to make FoxPro applications faster. It’s interesting seeing that an unswitched loop is faster than a switched loop. In any given day before reading this comparison, you can find me using the switched loop for reasons that I refrain from repeating lines of code as possible. Hmm… I’ll do some testing if I encounter this and decide if it’s about time to break some ‘old programming habbits’.

Foxpro-related links and news for the day: Cathy Pountney’s Hidden Secrets of the VFP IDE Part 02 | West Wind Web Connection 4.5 released.

Looks like Eric Rudder’s blog site is ‘moving’ these days. Eric Rudder is currently the Senior Vice President of Developer Tools at Microsoft. If my memory serves me right, he was also one of the main pillars behind Microsoft Visual Foxpro III.

Ah… one of the reasons why lLoveVisualFoxpro = .T. (Note: It’s l not I. l for ‘logical’. Though it doesn’t make any difference at all)

Random news:
Channel9… is now online. Microsoft Releases Source Code on SourceForge. That’s the news, the real deal is here.

Calvin Hsia posted the optimized code for that programming challenge initiated by The1 last week. If you haven’t read it yet, it is interesting to see The1’s own solution to this problem. Note that the comments about the Foxpro algorithm on this part refers to the first un-optimized approach.

For the record I was rooting for the FoxPro solution since day one. Give the code to a twelve year old who knows algebra and a little programming, I’ll bet he’ll understand the clarity of FoxPro’s syntax better. Run them altogether, two bucks FoxPro will come up with the complete output first.

There are some things in here that I do not like. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t respect it.

I seldom give comments on things I haven’t tried, but I must say that I don’t like the notion of creating database-related programming language solutions that tends to mold ‘lazy database programmers’ in the guise of ‘personal productivity’ which claims ‘to help developers overcome their most pressing challenges in minimal time’.

For you to overcome ‘pressing challenges’ in minimal time, you must have experience. And experience you will gain in the hard and longer way of writing ‘codes’.

Before I’ll continue allow me to state that I do have great respect behind the minds and developers of this so-called ‘approach of the future’. In this era where time is considered ‘gold-ier’ than before, it is indeed a great achievement to be able to trim down the development period of whatever project. I am also referring to database related things here which I believe is different when you’re developing a different type of application say a word processor, a spreadsheet or a software that calculates(nDistance, DetermineNearest(human(HealthCondition(X, Y, Z)), lReferencePoint=You)) has to be if You(lDecision = !visit(bathroom), nDays) for that said Human not to kiss the floor.

The baby-sitting type of approach to program development I believe is needed but in some ways I feel that it is the responsibility of the database programmer and not the PL itself. I want to extend the outmost limits of the control I have on the code I create. It is my code; get your hands off it� now! Yes… you, MissPL-with-the-white-shirt.

I also cringe at the idea of that ‘fill-in-the-blanks’ type of programming. Decades ago parameters were invented and even in these days, this is one of the greatest things a programmer can include in his arsenal. That would be next to OOP and one level behind neuron-pumping-trance/technotronic beats WinAmp plays while you’re coding/’developing’.

If one has to trudge that path of fill-in-the-blanks-because-I’m-too-lazy, let the programmer himself create his own user define function that fills in the blank.

This is probably one of the many reasons I left VisualBasic for VisualFoxpro five years ago. I want to have more control of the flow, the code, the logic, and to see more clearly what each line does instead of allowing a line or two of reserved words produce things for me. Call me ‘old school, call me ‘traditional’� call me whatever you want� but for now this is where I stand.

But do continue in this innovation of yours, great minds. Who knows in the future I might be convinced to jump on this jelly-looking bandwagon of yours. Besides, humans always have choices.

But for now I’ll dwell in this thrill and the art of pounding the keys, whispering longer eloquent words that only a digital loving silicon can fully understand.

Active Foxpro Pages. Step aside ASP and JSP.

So true.

It’s already 3AM… I’m up re-writing two forms/modules after realizing that a certain function, which will remain nameless for now, won’t work anymore after it was compiled into an .exe file. I overlooked that part BIG TIME and discovered the flaw just when I was about to start ‘burning’ files into a CD-R and selecting which type of dream channel I’d be visiting tonight.

Anyway… the freon’s back eventhough I have to stop coding every 320.198725 seconds just to do this little chant so that the fuse would remain intact.

Well… just another day in the life of a Foxpro programmer.

Just as I was wrapping up the client/server features of Project Sopheiai, I found this VFP Port Listener wiki thread. Ah well… I guess I’ll stick with my database approach for now since I am ‘passing’ large amount of data and from what I’ve heard, ports are being used by binary-loving-K-Paxians and other two bit alien lifeforms as a means of teleportation these days.

I’m still finishing up the iOpenLogic section of that project but to give you an overview, the server part clicks on a certain client list inside a grid which will return the programs running on a ‘client computer’ and the sites being browsed as well. In other words SERVER is monitoring if clients are browsing porn related materials or just chatting.

On a different note, Amazon and RSS _is_ a sexy combination.

I was googlin’ around looking for other Foxpro bloggers when I found that Scoble did post something about Foxpro almost four months ago. There are a lot of good things one can say about the man behind Scobleizer and the practice/idea of seeing the minds behind the development of a product talk/blog about what they are really doing… but I think that would be a subject of another blog for now.

For now let’s just boost a Foxpro programmer’s ego with Scoble’s words:

Heh, the FoxPro community is debating on whether the next version of FoxPro will be the “last.” Dang, this argument has been going on ever since Microsoft bought Fox. That happened shortly after I started at Fawcette, what, a decade ago?

Today FoxPro retains one of the strongest user communities of any Microsoft product. It still has some of the best database technology known to mankind. It was just a decade ahead of the rest, that’s all.

Will FoxPro be rewritten for Longhorn? As a Longhorn evangelist, I will work to try to convince FoxPro’s execs that the business opportunities opened up by the Longhorn wave will give them enough new sales of FoxPro to make it worth the investment. Will the Longhorn team win that argument? We can’t win them all. But clearly we’re at one of those inflection points in the industry’s history where product teams need to decide whether they will support the new platform or not. In every platform shift, there’ve been teams who’ve decided not to make the shift.

Just reading those words is enough to fire me up for today’s late-night-to-the-wee-hours-of-the-morning-Foxpro-related work. And the echo will still resonate even longer.

Ever heard of RptEngin? One of its nifty feature is creating FRXs out of Grids. Here’s an additional MSKB article: INFO: Where to Find the Wizard Applications’ Source Files.

XSource.zip is located inside \Tools\XSource of your Visual Foxpro directory.

VFP Design Pattern Catalog holds list of documented Visual Foxpro design patterns.

WinAPI in FoxPro is sometimes frustrating… if not always. I know that it did helped me last week while I’m solving some things. I know that it is challenging (Really it is!). I know that it handles memory more efficiently. What I don’t like is the idea that I can’t seem to do a thing without a reference or without ‘Googling’. Worse I’m slowly being transformed into a copy-and-paste declare-lovin’ pink-eyed monster with three fangs.

Is it even possible to be able to know (and memorize) all those parameters without a book?

Converting things from downloadable VB/C/Delphi snippets is not that easy too. Probably it is easier for VB/C/Delphi programmers but we’re talking about Foxpro here… we’re talking about getting used to a PL with clear, eloquent and straightforward syntax and semantics. I even have to lookup each WinAPI code used inside another WinAPI code, do that lame trial and error approach isolating each variable while calling on the guardians of the seas and skies just to add a shadow on a certain box. So frustrating that I’m beginning to hear Photoshop voices mocking me using the last seven letters of the alphabet.

But I’ll get back to charm you, Miss WinAPI. One of these days. It’s quite hard tackling you after sleeping at 4AM for almost 12 consecutive days.

On the lighter side of things, Foxpro.catalyst is now available in RSS Feeds with the help of GMM-RS, an add-on for the Greymatter scripts this site is using. Installation is straightforward but if you’ll hit a roadblock, just download this RSS.pm file, upload in a directory named XML inside your cgi-bin folder and type the words ‘Format C: /u /s’ on your DOS window.

Foxpro-warp: Visual Foxpro User Group. While the lay-out of the site is… uhm… ‘not that good’, it contains a LOT of good (and i mean GOOD) and ‘phat’ foxpro-related materials inside. So let’s concentrate on the content since content is indeed KING. The heck with the lay-out… [“,].

Semi-randomness spurt:

• Six Sigma to the rescue?
• Firefox fills the IE void
• Firefox May be Better, But Internet Explorer is Entrenched
• OOoSwitch: 501 Things You Wanted to Know About Switching to Open Office.org
• Monti to Microsoft: Guilty as charged

Hmmm…

Foxite‘s Dale Dedoroy, a fellow Filipino FoxPro programmer pointed to me yesterday that in VF8, one does not need the VB6 DLL anymore (I have discussed FoxTray.ocx ealier last week). And I did overlooked the fact that I haven’t copied/’Regsvr32-ed’ that VB6 dll when I visited a client last Friday. Goodie… now I can re-activate this FlameVB mode.

Do check Dale’s articles at Foxite: An alternative to Kodak image edit scrollbars � Thumbnails, anyone? (and Part 2) � Tame the string and Teach the Fox hunt pictures better.

Have you considered opening your own fox/work-related blogs too, Dale?

More Foxite articles for you, fox-lovin’-insomniac.